"I enjoyed the capstone design courses that I took as part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum when I attended Carnegie Mellon University," said ECE alumnus Jeff Silvey (M.S. 1998; B.S. 1996), a principal member of the technical staff at DRS-SS. "Capstone design courses provided engineering project skills required for my engineering career."

Silvey will help judge the contest for the Outstanding Design Project Award at the end of the semester and will keep up-to-date on the progress of the students throughout the semester. The course provides students with a rich, in-depth design and application hardware project experience in the areas of digital communications and/or signal processing systems using digital signal processing (DSP) hardware. Teams of students work on a semester-long project of their choice. Topics include speech and music processing, digital communications, multimedia processing, data compression, data storage, wireless communications, CD, and image and/or signal processing.

Digital Communication and Signal Processing Systems Design is one of the department's capstone design courses in the signals and systems area. Undergraduates in the ECE Department are required to take a capstone design course, which provides hands-on experience that enhances the student's repertoire of professional problem-solving and engineering design skills in the context of realistic engineering situations. Pupils work in teams to formulate a problem, propose an engineering solution or a design while weighing technical and socioeconomic constraints, and make sound professional judgments among alternative solutions.

DRS-SS specializes in the design and manufacture of a variety of communications-surveillance products, employing engineers with education in digital hardware, signal processing, analog circuit design, software engineering, and mechanical engineering. DRS-SS has a broad product profile covering all aspects of signals intelligence. Their applications are deployed worldwide by virtually all of the U.S. military, as well as several allied international governments and defense prime contractors.